Monday, March 31, 2014

Priorities:
The Obama administration says it is concerned about global warming
and encourages the development and spread of sustainable technologies
like solar energy. As long as the solar equipment used is US made.
None of this India using locally manufactured stuff, nope, that's
cheating. Profits first, saving civilization second.

Sauces: Just as 24/7 surveillance of US citizens is
fine with Congress but a little surveillance of Congress is
unacceptable, it seems that the US hacking into Chinese tech
companies is fine, but when they hack the US it is cyberterrorism.
Drones,
anyone?

Clear
And Present Danger: Returns on 10 and
20-year government bonds in the US and UK predict that extremely low
interest rates will continue will into 2016, and beyond 2020 for the
EU nations. A decade and more of ultra-low rates; and that's just to
get to a 2% level. Secular
stagnation in all its glory with no encouragement for investors
to invest or for companies to borrow or banks to lend. It implies
low growth, low wages, extended unemployment and low everything
economic for years to come. Given this, how can soaring stock prices
be justified – other than by continuing the hollowing out of the
economy for the benefit of the few? Worse, the step from
low inflation to deflation threatens. Couple that with the
inevitable increases in food and energy costs and it is easy to
envision some very bad outcomes.

Motive
Purity: The rigid stiffling of worker
advancement by Steve Jobs and friends was “needed to protect
innovation” (they claim) and (here's the true part) “to avoid
spiraling costs.” It was for our own good.

Relax
and Enjoy:
An IBM honcho says that
the ubiquitous tracking and monitoring of the public through
biometrics is too far advanced to stop, so we should stop worrying
about this latest assault on our individuality and privacy and figure
out how we can best enjoy the attention. Anyone with enough money
and manpower will soon be able to know where we are and what we are
doing at all time. “Everything will be monitored” he said. Get
over it.

Relaxation
Therapy: Don't get all worked up about
the Supremes siding with Hobby Lobby. Hope that they do. Because
that will put paid to the idea that the people behind a corporation
are not the corporation. If the corporation can deny a worker
certain health benefits because of the beliefs of its owners, then
the legal veil between a corporation and its owners has been pierced.
From then on we can sue the owners for what the companies they own
do.

Confession:
“We don’t actually know much about how to produce rapid economic
growth — conservatives may think they know (low taxes and all
that), but there is no evidence to back up their certainty. On the
other hand, we know how to make a big difference in income
distribution, especially how to reduce extreme poverty.” It's
called redistribution.

A
Rose By Any Other Name: A judge has
ruled that Beef Products Inc. can belatedly sue ABC News for calling
pink slime pink slime. The company maintains that calling pink slime
pink slime cost the company $1.2 billion, which is a lot of pink
slime. They claim that pink slimes actual name is “lean finely
textured beef” - which not even its friends call it - and isn't
slime at all but finely ground up connective tissue, trimmings, and
other pieces of the less palatable pieces of animals – presumably
cattle – that are mixed, chopped, heated and spun in a centrifuge,
resulting in a squishy pink goo. Note that the only part of the ABC
description that the beef people have a beef with is the sobriquet
'pink slime'. If ABC had instead used the phrase “a pink slimy goo
called lean finely textured beef' everyone would have been happy.
Except the customers.

Fun
With Numbers: It is harder to get a job at Walmart (2.6% of applicants get
hired) than it is to get into Harvard (8.9% of applicants get
admitted). Apples and Oranges, true. And those applying to
Harvard pretty much know where next week's groceries are going to
come from. Who's the teacher and what do we learn?

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Generally when a
politician says something particularly stupid, he's just sucking up
to a particularly stupid demographic.

Back
By Popular Demand: Irresponsible parents
in Orange County California are responsible for the worst outbreak of
measles in the US in over 20 years. In one charter school in the
county 56%
of kindergartners were intentionally unvaccinated because
California has a law that says parents can put their kids at risk
based on irrational fears. Measles had been eradicated from the US
by 2000, but the anti-science bunch has managed to reverse that.

Making
The Cut: Michigan's Republican governor
has signed a bill eliminating early voting on weekends, because too
many hourly workers – suspected Democrats – were avoiding the
long lines after work on election day. The managerial class –
thought to be Republicans – can still take a few hours off during
the week to vote, so it's a win-win. Trump:
A federal judge has ruled that a company's
censoring search results for political reasons was simply editing and
as such was protected under the First Amendment. In essence, lying is
protected speech – but we knew that.

Travel
Plans: Gay marriage is now legal in
England and Wales. Back
in the US, the AG says that the federal government will recognize
the same sex marriages conducted in Michigan - turns out that the
Governor can't retroactively nullify legally performed weddings.

Permanently
Temporary: The dramatic increase in
contract and temporary jobs since the Current Unpleasantness began is
likely to become a permanent feature of American employment
practices. It is far cheaper for the companies. Ask your local
college about adjunct faculty.

Drumroll:
There are 67 people who together have more money than the poorest
3.5 billion of us. That's $1.7 trillion, in case you were wondering.
And an average $486 for each of the 3.5 billion on the bottom of the
heap, while elite average $31 billion. Over 40% of these biggies are
Americans. Porn
O'Graph: Is the S&P a bubble? Yes,
funny you should ask.

Friday, March 28, 2014

New
Revised Version: Obama says it is unfair
to compare Putin's invasion of Crimea with America's war in Iraq. To
whom?

Yes
We Scan: The administration plans to stop gathering all that data about
your phone usage and make the phone companies keep it until Uncle
wants it to harass you. But don't worry, they'll pretend to get a
warrant and fully intend to pay the phone companies for ratting you
out.

Mirror,
Mirror: After a thorough investigation,
Governor Christie has announced that he was unable to find any wrong
doing on the part of Governor Christie in the Case of the Magical
Lane Closings.

Secular
Speculations: What if we need negative
interest rates to get the economy moving and no one wants to accept
negative rates and the government fails to get inflation going? The
economy will not get moving for a long, long time. And we need
negative interest rates to encourage investment. But who is sitting
on all those dollars? Not the poor. Not
the bottom 90%. If we can't get the rich to invest, maybe we
should take the money away from them and put it to work.

It's
Only Business: The Italian mafia makes
more in a year than McDonald's and Deutsche Bank combined. But not
as much as Walmart.

Social
Serviced: Walmart's annual report warns
that “changes in the amount of payments made under the
Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance
plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance
plans...” will cut into their future profits. They did not suggest
they would pay their employees more just because they are getting
less from federal support programs. Size
Matters:
The EPA is strengthening the sanctions to be assessed on companies
that dump pollutants into streams the flow into major waterways.
Polluting streams that flow into minor
waterways remains an acceptable business practice.

And
The Band Began To Play: The IMF is
rushing to Ukraine's assistance, offering them $18 billion if they
accept the same austerity measures that – just last month – the
IMF said didn't work and were likely to cause social upheaval. Let
the looting begin.

Once
Upon A Tine: I'm old enough to remember
segregation being defended on religious, biblical grounds – exactly
the way slavery had earlier been justified. It's not “The devil
made me do it”, but that God said it was okay. There's a reason we
have to separate church and state.

Fact-O-Rama:
There are nearly as many payday loansharks in the US as there are
McDonald's and Starbucks, loaning money out at 400% a year –
legally.

Jesus
Wept: Tennessee pased a law letting
students discriminate against others and blame it on God. The bill
also permits students to answer test questions using Biblical
Authority, which is going to tickle the biology teachers no end.
It's not as if Tennessee needed any additional legislation to
illustrate the futility of evolution.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Ye
Olde Slippery Slope: The general
impression from those in the room was that the Supremes are inclined
to rule that Hobby Lobby does have the right to impose their
religious beliefs on their employees. However, there is a difference
between private beliefs and public behavior – witness our current
lack of 'Whites Only' signs.

Clear
And Present Danger: Local public schools
teaching an essential, federally mandated minimum curriculum should
be funded by taxes paid by all citizens. Certainly parents should
be allowed to send their children to any private school they can
afford, but that should not relieve them of their civic duty to pay
taxes to support public schools. None of that tax money should find
its way to any private entity. The $1 billion a year being funneled
into private schools should be stopped and returned to the public
schools.

Farm
Teams: A NLRB examiner has agreed with
the Northwestern University football players who claimed the right to
form a union because they were “employees” under contract to the
university who received wages in return for services rendered.

Asked
& Answered: Will a degree from a
for-profit diploma mill get you a job? Will you actually turn a
profit on the investment - on your student loan? No, and the fact
that you had to ask suggests you failed Research 101, Marketing 101
and Capitalism 101. For extra credit, estimate how many years it
will take you to pay off the loans you took out to earn that
worthless degree: _____ . And how much could you have socked away
toward yur retirement if you hadn't been suckered into the whole
charade? ____ .

A
Little Help From My Friends: "The
presence of a more liberal government is related to a higher rate of
reported health, a lower rate of reported smoking, lower BMI, and
fewer numbers of days with poor health." Damned socialists.

Hot
Topic:
French economist Thomas Piketty's "Capital In The Twenty-First
Century" has become the
thing for economists and economic bloggers to cuss, discuss and
misconstrue, mainly because ait gives them a chance to talk about
inequality. Well, I can play that game, too. Most agree that
inherited wealth has once more become (or has always been, opinions
vary) the preeminent source of political economic power in the US.
That their income is essentially tax free is by design, their design.
Promoting inherited wealth over work, George W. Bush's biggest
tax breaks went coupon-clippers and heirs - he and his family
specifically included. The right wingers have long valued
capital over labor and worked to preserve that privilege. Today the
level of inequality in the treatment of earned vs. unearned
income in the United States is “probably higher than in any other
society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world,”
Certainly “the
concentration of wealth has soared to levels that have not been
seen in over a century…" Some claim that capitalism
can be regulated so as to force capitalists to keep the division
of the spoils sufficiently broad to prevent collapse and rebellion.
Maybe so, but why should we help them keep us subservient? The
challenge is knowing what to do.

Memorize
This: We will not be able to reduce our
budget deficit, or put the long term unemployed back to work, or
raise GDP levels closer to potential as long as we have large trade
deficits.

Not
Here: In Croatia, a child's right to
health trumps the parent's right to be idiots.

Different
Strokes:The Tea Party placating
Republican Right wants to kill Common Core because, despite decades
of evidence to the contrary, “students are best served when
decisions about education are made at the state and local level.”
Because reading, writing and arithmetic vary from place to place,
y'know.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

All
Together Now: Pro-Russian separatist
movements are sprouting in Latvia and Estonia. Russia is also
stirring things up in Moldavia.
Catalonia
wants to part from Spain, and the island of
Sardinia wants Switzerland to adopt it. And Venice
wants to become the Serene Republic once again. The
Neighborhood: New home sales fell 3.3%
m/m in February, to an annualized pace of 440,000. January's 9.6%
increase was cut to just a 3.2% rise m/m. Case-Shiller
reported a 0.85% increase in existing home prices m/m in January.

Trade
Secrets: The US government, after
mendaciously praising Nelson Mandela once he was old and out of
power, refuses to release any information about the role US
intelligence played in his 1962 arrest, nor why he was kept on the
terrorist watch list until long after he stepped down as South
Africa's president. What, that's not in your history book?

Exhibit
One: The Swedish government sponsored a
conference at the Sheraton in Stockholm on discrimination against the
Roma (Gypsies). The Swedish expert scheduled to present the main
talk was unable to attend. She is Roma and the hotel would not let
her into the meeting.

Writing
Prompt: The Australian Attorney General
says that “people have the right to be bigots.” Yes. But...

Market
Mumbles: Financial blogger Henry Blodget
sees stocks as being "so expensive that they will likely deliver
crappy performance over the next decade. I also believe that there is
a decent chance of a 40%-to-50% crash in the next couple of years.
but he's not selling his stocks, not yet. Albert
Edwards (Societe Generale) notes that "A decline in profits
is inevitably followed by recession shortly thereafter.." And
then says that profits
have begun declining...

What
Part Of This Makes Sense? A court in Sweden dismissed attempted rape charges against a man
because the victim was a transsexual, not a biological woman.

Big
Wheel Keeps On Turning: World Vision,
one of the largest Christian charity organizations in the world, has
announced it will hire legally married LGBT Christians.

Shale
Game: Art
Berman says
shale is not a revolution; it’s a retirement party. All US shale
gas production growth in areas except the Marcellus are flat or
already in decline.
There are lots of gas resources – after all, 'resources' are just
guesses – but not that much that is commercially viable at current
prices. Thus the shale gas boom is not sustainable except at higher
prices. Many shale gas extraction companies are spending more than
they are earning. Conventional gas accounts for almost 60% of US gas
and it is declining at about 20% per year, while unconventional gas
plays decline at more than 30% each year. The
US needs to replace 19 billion cubic feet per day each year to
maintain current production levels. That's almost four Barnett shale
plays at full production each year, and economicaly produceable
reserves to continue at these levels do not exist. When boosters say
we will never run out, 'never' doesn't mean what you think it does.

Donation?
What Donation? The BP
US Chamber of Commerce is filing an amicus brief in support of BP's
current attempt to weasel out of the settlement agreement it had
entered into with Gulf Coast individuals and businesses.

Here
And There: At the current rate of
“industrial accidents”, building the stadiums and such for the
2022 World Cup games in Qatar will kill more people than terrorists
did on 9/11. But most of them are Nepalese or Indian laborers... Porn
O'Graph: In it to win it.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Buyer's
Remorse: We spend all that money on the
NSA and they shred the constitution and listen to everyone in the
world 24/7 and we still don't know the Russians are going to annex
Crimea? How is it Putin made the do not eavesdrop list while Jimmy
Carter and Angelika Merkel didn't?

Sky,
Falling: Veteran fund manager and
all-round grumpy guru Jeremy Grantham says central banks have created
an enormous bubble in stocks and he expects that "the next bust
will be unlike any other," and that the market will have
negative returns over the next seven years.

Credentials:Turkish PM Erdogan, who doesn't
"understand how people of good sense could defend this Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter" Me, either, but that doesn't mean that
those without good sense shouldn't be allowed to amuse each other.
Anyone with that poor an understanding of people and their social
networks isn't fit to be a leader. Which was their point, and that's
why Erdogan has banned them. Or tired to.

Qualification:
The US is sending 150 more special operations personnel to Uganda to
hunt down the infamous warlord Joseph Kony. More. The first bunch
was dispatched back in 2011. Quietly.

How
To: Anyone can become rich by following
Warren Buffet's example. Step one, put a few billion dollars into...
Or
not.

Contraband:
A joint Germany/Vatican drug sting came to nothing when no one showed
up at the Vatican Post Office to claim the 14 condoms full of
cocaine. The Germans seized the cocaine, the Vatican the condoms.

Noted:
Telling the truth is considered to be naïve. Snail's
Trails: The House Republicans want to
overturn a 108 year-old law that lets the President protect and
preserve iconic American places like the Statue of Liberty, the Grand
Canyon and Arches National Park. Why? Because that black upstart in
the White House used it to preserve part of the California Coast near
Point Arena and any thing Obama is for they are against. Republicans
have killed all legislative efforts to protect wilderness, parks and
monuments since the Tea Party takeover in 2010. America is ours for
the exploiting, not for wasting tax dollars on, y'know.

Crime's
Down, Cop's Up: US crime rates are way
down, militarized police forces are way up. If that makes you feel
good, remember you are far more likely to die at the hands of a cop
than a terrorist.

Housekeeping:
A court in Egypt on Monday sentenced 529 supporters of ousted
Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to death after a mass trial.

As
I Was Saying:
The UN's IPCC is set to deliver a new, and very depressing, report
on our changing climate. And it is not all about melting ice and
stranded polar bears. It's about hunger, disease, drought,
flooding, refugees and war, It's about all those things become more
frequent and much worse. Okay, go back to sleep now. The
Zombies: The long term unemployed are
not ever getting jobs, they are destined for the bottom of the heap.
And the increase in this new, downwardly mobile population resulted
from deliberate choices made by the austerian debt doomsters.

Familiarity
Breeds Indifference? Norway has
lowered the incidence of sexual harassment in its army by quartering
female and male soldiers together in shared bedrooms. Maybe it leads
to friendships, or familial relationships. Or maybe it's like
marriage, resulting in the maximization of opportunity and the
minimization of motivation.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Because
They Can: Microsoft, citing its own
lawyers as the authority, says it has the right to break into your
accounts and read your emails and instant messages. Because the vine
print to every MS product says they can. Showing a bit of dry humor,
Google - which acknowledges that it reads your mail before it
delivers it to you - is going to begin encrypting your emails so the
NSA can't do the same thing.

Measure
for Measure: Former President Carter no
longer uses e-mail because he n longer trusts the government. For
the same reason, you might reconsider
that cell phone in your pocket. Sure it's handy, the best bait
is always sweet. TB,
MDR-TB and XDR-TB: TB is one of the
deadliest diseases in the world even though it is curable. Every year
8 million contract TB and 1.3 million of them die from it. Multiple
Drug Resistant TB is just that - strains of TB that are resistant to
most treatments for it. There are about half a million cases of
MDDR-TB every year and the treatment is long, complex and expensive
and only half of those treated survive the 2 years of daily
injections and 10,000 pills. XDR-TB is eXtremely Drug Resistant is
worse, and gaining popularity.

Planning
Ahead: Two-thirds of American workers
report they have set aside some money for their retirement - down
form 75% in 2009. Over one in three of those who have "retirement
savings" have less than $1,000. Another 30% of those who have
set aside money to live on have less than $25,000. So let's cut
Social Security.

Unclear
On The Concept: Creationists are
demanding their mythology be featured along with actual science on
the Neil DeGrasse Tyson 'Cosmos' series. To provide 'balance', or
maybe to prove they're unbalanced. Price
Fixing:
About those good-paying high-tech jobs in tghe computer industry...
They'd be a lot higher if Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar, Luxasfilm,
Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks and
others had not illegally conspired (since 2006) to hold down the
salaries of nearly a million high-tech workers. But being computer
firms, they naturally committed their conspiracy to documents. Their
bad.

Bricks
Without Straw: Ukraine, as it signed an
agreement promising closer political and economic ties with the EU,
made clear that it expects the EU to provide it with energy if those
nasty Russians cut off their natural gas supplies. Quite where
Europe, which gets 30% of its natural gas from Russia, will get the
energy or how it will reverse the pipeline flows are unanswered
questions. Sort of like, if we had some baconwe could have some
bacon and eggs if we had some eggs.

I've
Got Mine: The global warming deniers have
won. Statistically, it's all over. Scientists will continue to
warn us about global warming, but to no avail. We are not going
discomfort ourselves to save ourselves, no matter how horrible their
projections or how sure they are of them.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

There is nothing quite so
tempting as a poorly managed country with exploitable resources.Jesse.

Balancing
Act:
As the West and Russia enter into The Sanctions Game, it is hard to
handicap the tit-for-tattiness. Western banks have lent billions to
Russia and Russian firms. Europe needs Russia's natural gas. Russian
gangsters
oligarchs have billions tied up in the West. Putin needs the income
from that gas. Europe can switch suppliers faster than Russia can
come up with new customers. The neocons have been missing a really
good villain...

The
Paper Chase:
The big tech firms can pretend
all they want that they did not cooperate with the NSA in
violating your privacy, but only if billing the government for
sending them your data is thought of as not cooperating. Too bad
someone got copies of the invoices.

Sounds
Plausible:Jack
Matlock,
former US Ambassador to the USSR, says that in annexing Crimea, Putin
may be at least partially reacting to years
of provocation by the US, including the eastward march of NATO and
the expansion of US military bases in Eastern Europe.

Full
Service:
Google is being sued for reading children's emails in order to show
advertisers that their ads in Google's Apps
for Education
were working.

Level
Playing Field:
Living "paycheck to paycheck" is not the exclusive
purview of the lower classes – those we think of as the poor. But
about a third of American households have little or no liquid assets,
no cash, no savings or checking accounts. They are not officially
poor - they own things a house, cars, and have some money in a
401k's. But they have no excess cash, they live from payday to
payday, just like the rest of the poor.

Unlucky:
Research shows that the long-term unemployed are destined to be just
that – unemployed. Forever. Their chance of getting a job, any
job, are so slim that economically they are irrelevant. No matter how
many resumes they send out, phone calls they make, ads they answer,
they are not going to get a job and thus do not count as part of the
labor pool. So it is entirely possible that a labor shortage could
occur while millions of the long term unemployed are... unemployed.

Getting
Really Real:
The average US wage, in real dollars indexed to 1982-84, increased a
bit last year and now is only 13.5% lower than it was in 1972. After
40 years, lower wages are beginning to look like a trend. 'splain
to me:
"We’re doing worse than anyone could have imagined a few
years ago, yet people seem increasingly to be accepting this
miserable situation as the new normal. How did this happen?" Got
Milk? Why?
Milk was designed by Mom as a food for newborn calves. Period. No
mater what the dairy lobby says, it was not designed for you. No
one ever died of a dairy deficiency. Lots of folks – nearly
everyone but European whites – are lactose intolerant by design. It
is not a disease or a failing. Now cheese, on the other hand...

Slips
Ahoy:
NCIS, apparently just because they can, has a database tracking your
parking tickets, traffic citations, and minor traffic accidents. And
if you've been arrested (to hell with waiting for the conviction), or
a cop has written up an encounter information card with your name on
it, they've got that too. And they share all this with almost any
federal, state or local law enforcement agency.
Posse
commetas?
We don't need no posse
commetas. Down
The Drain:
The last remaining stable portion of the Greenland ice sheet, the
Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet, is stable no more. The northeast ice
stream stretches more than 370 miles into the center of the ice
sheet, where it connects with the heart of Greenland's ice reservoir.
It has the potential of “significantly changing the total mass
balance of the ice sheet in the near future.” As in “look out
below.”

Confirmation
Classes: 72 studies involving 600,000 patients shows that eating food
high in fish oils/omega-3 does not reduce the risk of heart disease.

Where's
Waldo?Facebook
says it has a program that can accurately match a photo of you to any
other photo of you – alone or in a group – 97.25% of the time.
Just imagine what some evil government agency could do with that.
And will. Or already does.

Bossy:
Uganda's First Lady says that she is not personally acquainted
with any gay cows which – to her mind – proves there is no such
thing as homosexuality. Obviously this lady has never watched a
herd of milch cows very long. Dragnet:
According to the LAPD and LA County Sheriff's Department, owning a
car in the LA area is reasonable grounds to suspect you are involved
in criminal activity, even though the cops don't know quite what it
is that you've done. Yet. But they're sure that if they watch you
long enough, they'll catch you at something.

#censored:
Upset that people keep posting recordings of his government's
corruption on social networks, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan is
making good on his threat to ban access to Twitter in the country.

When
You Gotta Go... Billy Graham’s
daughter suggests that the missing Malaysia
Airlines
plane disappeared in a ‘small snapshot’ of the Rapture

Making
Tracks: Caterpillar continues to
disappoint, making it 15 consecutive months of declining sales as
February's sales were down 8% from February 2013 (which had been down
13% from February 2012). Says something about the heavy construction
and resource extraction industries, no?

Chinese
Fire Drill: Goldman has joined other
major banks in cutting its 2014 GDP growth forecast for China,
expecting both export trade and internal consumption to fall as the
world's second largest economy encounters “a bumpy road.” Bumps
like megawealthy
Chinese liquidating the luxury houses they bought offshore as tax
dodges – in order to raise money against their borrowing, large
firms defaulting on billions in bonds resulting in a 'bear
raid' on the Hang
Seng and a sudden drop
in the value of the Yuan large enough to trigger tens of billions
of losses for speculators
bankers.

Ooops: Merrill Lynch has sent an appology
to the Irish for underestimating the cost to the citizenry of
nationalizing the losses of their four largest banks - by €47
billion. Or 800%, whichever seems smaller. And it wasn't their
fault, because, because... But they did not offer to give back the
7.3 million euros they were paid for the advice.

Dominoes:
There are 55,000 electrical power substations in the nation. If
nine of them (properly
selected)
were to go out at once, the entire US electrical grid would collapse.
And would be down for about 18 months – which is how long it would
take to replace the big transformers (which
are not made in the US anymore).

Next?
How concerned should we be that Putin is “concerned” ethnic
Russians in Estonia have to learn Estonian - which really does seem
to be a hardship?

Captive
Camera: Citizens in Florida are suing
the cops for arresting them for photographing and arrest on a public
street. Cops
in New Jersey got caught photographing people who weren't
properly deferential at a Christie town hall meeting. Anonymously
filed bill in the Kansas House would let police arrest people who
file complaints against them and would prevent appeals to higher
authorities. The anonymously filed bill would also outlaw anonymous
complaints.

Quoted:
“We already have museums for women — they are called malls”
Rush Limbaugh.

Mulligans:
Toyota has been hit with a $1.2 billion criminal fine and required to
“fully admit wrongdoing” in connection with the 2009 – 2010
stuck accelerator recall, after investigation showed the company knew
about the problems and did not fix them. The business decision
behind this – that paying for a few deaths was cheaper than fixing
the problem – is not unique to Toyota – remember
the Pinto? And then there's GM
and the ignition switch. Ain't capitalism grand?

I
Can't Get It For You Wholesale: New
Jersey now prohibits Tesla from selling their vehicles in the state
because auto dealers are afraid of the competition. The auto dealers
warn that direct auto sales would threaten their livelihood.
Another fine aspect of true capitalism, which prefers captive
customers to actual free markets.
"Our economy is based on the belief that companies should
provide the highest quality product at the lowest possible price... "
they say, while inserting an unnecessary profit taker between the
manufacturer and the customer. What
do auto dealerships do? They maximize the amount we pay for cars.

The
Takers: Since 2000, Fortune 100
companies have raked in $1.2 trillion in welfare payments from the
government. And that does not include any of the bailout money. At
least they don't take food stamps... but they could, because
corporations are people, right?

Streets
Paved With Gold: While the government
was busy rescuing JPMorgan, BofA and the other Usual Suspects, it did
nothing to prevent the collapse of about 500 small banks around the
country. Small banks are key to small businesses, you know, the
one's the politicians claim to love so much. But with their
disappearance, the economic health of their counties has suffered
greatly and continues to do so. Saving the global economy may have
been important, but if you live in a small town with a failed bank,
the local economy is far more important to you than how Wall Street's
doing.

Happy
Birthday: Saudi Arabia has had its
troops blocking the approaches to tiny Bahrain for three years now,
keeping the despised dictator Hamad bin Isa Alkhalifa in power -
mainly because of the Saudi aversion to democracy. Who's
Driving This Train? The Pentagon has
announced a “multinational training exercise” will take place in
Ukraine. Let's hope there are no live-fire exercises.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Data does not speak for itself, and the quality of
interpreters varies.

Told
Ya' So: Remember when they said the NSA
did not listen to our phone calls and only performed analysis on the
'meta data'? Turns out they were telling a version of the truth.
But now it turns out the can reach into that big closet of theirs and
listen to them whenever they want. And they could do it to 100% of
the calls in a certain 'unidentified' country back in 2009. That was
then, this is now.

The
Worm Turns: Nearly 75% of the US corn
crop is grown from Bt-seed, genetically designed to be impervious to
rootworms. Too bad the rootworms have evolved to happily munch away
at Bt-corn. It's almost enough to make you believe in evolution...

Cow/Cabbage:
US productivity has quadrupled since 1947, and until about 1980 the
workers shared in the gains, but since then. Oddly, that's about the
time unions became obsolete. The ever widening gap is the defining
issue of our time. It is not just about the money. It's about the
pitchforks, too.

Zero
Tolerance: A kid in Jefferson, Ohio has
been kicked out of school and arrested for having a pocket knife in
his car parked on school property. Are lobotomies a prerequisite for
school administrators? The
Rest of the Story: In order to prepare
their students to face the real world, many colleges have opened food
banks for their students.

Diagnosis: According to Pat Robertson, God gave a woman cancer in order to
encourage her to forgive her abusive father.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Common
Theme: Iraq, war, all about the oil.
Afghanistan, war, all about the pipeline. Crimea, only blather,
because Russia sells $160 billion worth of petroleum to Europe and
the US every year.

Wise
Guys: True insiders – corporate
officers and directors – are more bearish they have been in nearly
25 years. And they theoretically know more about their own companies'
prospects than the market in general.

To
The Rear March: In an abrupt and historic
reversal, the IMF now cites investing in health care and education
and instituting progressive taxation as effective ways to decrease
inequality and promote growth, while singling out austerity polices
as worsening inequality and hampering economic growth. Never mind
that for at least a half-century the IMF has insisted that austerity
was the only way to go. Don't hold your breath waiting for the
agency to change the conditions it attaches to bailouts – it has a
long history of doing the opposite of what it knows to be best for
the countries and people that are its clients because these things
benefit its patrons, the banks and the rich.

Sticks
And Stones: Saudi Arabia, not content
with banning
420 books at the Riyadh International Book Show, has also banned
50 names as being blasphemous and inappropriate. The
Other Thing: Sure, there's appalling
inequity in income and in wealth distribution in this country. But
the more serious inequality is in health and longevity. Poverty not
only diminishes a person's life circumstances, it diminishes his
life. Poor males die about six years earlier than the rich. That's
why raising Social Security and Medicare entitlement ages is so wrong
– its saying that
the poor must work until they drop because the lawyers and CEOs
are living longer.

Gee
Mail: User-friendly Google wants the
court to black out all that stuff in the trial transcript that
details how it steals information from your e-mails before you open
them. It's a proprietary business secret, they claim. Unlike your
e-mails, which are merely private secrets and thus not worth
protecting. Pyhrric
Victory: The NSA is getting better at its
job. Too bad its job seems to be watching us 24/7. NSA does not
trust any of us. The want to suck up every electronic trace there is
of anything and everything we do and keep it forever, "just in
case." It's like the cops videotaping everything you do in
every room of your house, all the while, promising not to watch any
of the footage unless an acquaintance of one of your friends is
suspected of doing something wrong. Why not let them? Because it is
unconstitutional. End of story.

Weight
Drop Dropped: It turns out that the
claimed drop in childhood obesity was a statistical error; actually
the obesity rate may have risen. Damned decimal points...

Evidence
Be Damned: There is a persistent belief
that government money-printing and deficits inexorably lead to
runaway inflation and that 'easy money' policies are morally corrupt
anyway, no matter their efficiency. Even though years of QE and
deficits have not led to any inflation, much less rampant inflation,
but facts do not budge the true believers. That doom has not shown up
and is not visible on the horizon does not mean it isn't out there,
over the horizon. Or rainbow. So there's always hope. Or fear. We're
Lovin' It: Macky D is being sued for
tampering with time-sheets, withholding overtime pay, docking pay for
uniforms, forcing workers to clock out while working during non-busy
store hours, and barring workers from taking breaks. Great business
model: Pay your workers the minimum, then steal part of that.

Our
Town: A South Dakota Republican lawmaker
claims that KKK business owners should have the right to ban blacks
and gays from their premises. A female GOP PAC leader says women
are too busy to be concerned with the equal pay issue.

Monday, March 17, 2014

If free market competition
produces excellence, how do you explain cable TV?

Usual
Suspects: The
FDIC is suing 16 banks – BofA, Citi, JPMorgan, etc. etc. - for
rigging the Libor rate for years and years and years. For so long
they all thought it was their natural right to steal money that way. Apocalypse
How: A NASA
funded research paper says that our unsustainable consumption of
resources, our excessively large population and the increasing levels
of inequality will lead to “irreversible collapse.” This is not
exactly a fringe group of doomster conspiracy nuts. The authors cite
compelling historical data showing that "precipitous collapse -
often lasting centuries - have been quite common” throughout
history. The main factors leading to civilizational collapse have
been excess population, changing climate, high levels of economic
stratification, water shortages, agricultural failure and failing
energy sources. Sound familiar?

Desperation:
Turkish PM Erdogan claims that a 15 year old boy who died nine months
after being put in a coma by Turkish police putting down a
demonstration, was a terrorist and that his death was an act of
terrorism. Or something like that. Naturally, riot
police fired rubber bullets as tens of thousands of protesters
mourned the dead teenager.

Division
Of Spoils: The
bonuses handed out by Wall Street in 2013 came to more than all the
wages earned by all the minimum wage workers in the nation.

Crime
Stoppers:
Workers at an Ontario turkey farm were videoed “punching, kicking,
and throwing turkeys”, and crushing the birds spines and heads with
metal rods and shovels. This is the sort of thing that is against
the law in several US states. The
videotaping, that is.

The
Doctor Is In/Out:
Why is it Obama's fault that your doctor's greed led him to chose
not to accept your insurance? It's just business; insurance companies
send patients to the lowest bidder to keep costs down and make more
profits. Not their fault your doctor doesn't think you're worth his
time.

Words:
'Recovery'
doesn't mean what you think it does. Nor does 'recession'. They're
just statistical concepts, having little relevance to reality unless
you live in some economist's model. Striking
Back: A federal
judge has ruled that Tennessee must recognize marriages legally
performed in any other state. Kentucky, Utah and Texas have also
been so educated on the responsibilities of being one of the United
States. In
Arkansas a federal judge has struck down the law banning most
abortions after the 12th week of pregnancy as an unconstitutional
infringement on a woman's constitutional rights. What
I'm Missing: I
don't have a smart phone, so I have to just guess when it's time to
go pee.

Smile,
They're On Candid Camera:
Baltimore's PD, after wasting nearly a quarter million dollars
trying to defend a cop who objected to being photographed making an
arrest, has told its officers that they cannot object to the public
recording them going about protecting the public. Philadelphia is
about to pay
for the same lesson. Logically:
A Colorado court has ruled that now that the state has legalized pot
use, some of those convicted of marijuana possession should have
those convictions overturned. In Washington, AG Holder backs
reducing
sentences for minor drug offenses. Now how are we going to keep
the jails filled, like our contracts with the private prisons
require?

Squeaky
Big Wheels:
Turns out that being a loudmouth is a huge advantage in the race to
dominate the competition. And it's far easier than actually being
good at something.

Do
As I Say: The
former cop who killed a man in a movie theater for texting, had been
texting from the theater just a few minutes earlier.

The
Commons: Measles
vaccine does not cause autism. Those who want an explanation for the
currently unexplainable and those who don't think government
conspiracies against us stop with the NSA have brainwashed enough
parents that we now – unnecessarily – are facing outbreaks of
measles. Parents do not have the right to inflict measles on their
children, nor do they have the right to pollute our shared
environment through their willful stupidity. Those
Guys: An Arizona
Republican claims that slavery wasn't so hard on the slaves and,
besides, it was good for the economy. One
in Ohio claims that a public education system is a socialist plot
and advocates complete privatization of schools.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.